I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to communication between systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a communication interface to aid transferring of data and information between systems and/or databases.
II. Description of the Related Art
Wireless devices, such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), pagers, laptops with wireless connectivity, etc., communicate packets including voice and data over a wireless network. These wireless devices have installed application programming interfaces (“APIs”) onto their local computer platform that allow software developers to create software applications that operate on the wireless device. The API sits between the wireless device system software and the software application, making the wireless device functionality available to the application without requiring the software developer to have the specific wireless device system source code.
These wireless devices typically need to communicate with other systems and databases within the other systems. Unfortunately, the wireless device may lose a signal during communication or be otherwise unavailable when transmitting information to other systems. This may cause errors when attempting to access a database when the signal is lost. The wireless device may be required to reinitiate the database access and resubmit the database request when the signal is reacquired.
Extended beyond wireless devices, often wire-based systems need to communicate with each other but do not share a similar “language” for communication. For example, as with wireless devices, one system may need to communicate with the database in another system to receive or insert data. To communicate with the database, the system must be aware of the database language, record and field structures, and formats in order to access and store information in the database. While current technologies provide for the ability for the interface between the system and the database to include the language, structure and format of the database, this becomes more complex when multiple databases, possibly requiring multiple unique database languages, etc., need to be accessed.
Furthermore, when data is to be sent to multiple systems, or conversely received from multiple systems, a common interface does not exist to integrate across the multiple systems to simplify the data transmission. This is problematic for systems communicating with several other systems.
Therefore, what is needed in the art is an interface that simplifies the communication between one or multiple databases and provides reliable and secure transfer of information between multiple systems.
Current methods in the art do not address this need. Database replication services and custom built database interfaces can become very complex and unwieldy if multiple databases need to be accessed. In addition, all systems that access the custom database must have that interface. Also, custom built databases are required to stay online for transactions to occur.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) only addresses the need for pre-defined message types and content specific to electronic commerce. The EDI message formats do not address the data exchange needs as it relates to wireless services, system integration considerations and billing specificity.